Nonprofit web design tips and more from CEDC

This article is about the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product—the construction of the elements of your navigation. This is the most important aid you can possibly give to your users as they are constantly seeking a reason to walk out on you.

1. Start with the user’s needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

Great stuff! Click through on each for more details and examples.

Usability.gov is a one-stop source for government web designers to learn how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible. The site addresses a broad range of factors that go into web design and development. The site will help you to:

• Plan and design usable sites by collecting data on what users need
• Develop prototypes
• Conduct usability tests and write up results
• Measure trends and demographics

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases…

Doesn’t even require a jQuery plugin — all core jQuery. Neato! (And, dare we say it, very similar to Tumblr’s scroll-to-top functionality).

We just implemented it on Sofie.org — scroll down on this page and test it out!